The Status-Quo:
Hi all - My wife and are moving and the tricky question of how to keep the infrastructure accessible which runs my business is needing addressing.

Infrastructure Overview:
I have a moderately complex network with a Windows 2019 domain controller, VMware, hypervisor, Synology NAS and all interconnected by a Draytek G2280 switch and 2860ac router. I've configured many VLANS and (for the next week) am still using Virgin Media Business as my ISP.

The Temporary Solution:
My friend is kindly accomodating my essential hardware in a condensed form in a rack at his house until we are able to move into our new home in 7 or 8 weeks. My friends network is a non-VLAN's simple private class C standard DHCP setup with a Windows Server 2012 laptop. My plan is to ship my hardware including my 2860ac Router and switch to it's temporary home at my friend's place and essentially, setup my router downstream of my friend's router, connecting the upstream router (my friend's) and my 'downstream' router via it's WAN port directly to an available ethernet port on the upstream router.

My friend uses PlusNET as a residential user with a static public IP address. I'm confident my friend's router can be configured (if need be) to accomodate my router downstream, accounting for a number of non-standard port redirections I use for external access to various admin consoles such as the NAS server.


My key objective is to sustain access to my network-in-a-rack as best as possible but critically, to be able to access my internal network via VPN where my AD is queried for VPN access by my 2860ac router using a VPN Users security group to allow access to group members.

Sure I understand that the above is presently too woolly to provide definitive answers / suggestions for me to clarify how to configure my router temporarily as a dwnstream router. But the solid assumption should be that I will have admin access to my friend's Upstream router as well as my own obviously.

My Objective:
Can anyone suggest (in an ideal world scenario) what technical concepts apply and more over, what configurations changes I would need to address on both routers to enable me to access my LAN and all it's infrastructure services which are depended upon and critically, sustaining my business' smaller (but no less important) revenue streams. I can happily provide more of a granular detail if anyone is kind enough to help a stressed out small business owner to cope with keeping his network up and running temporarily until the BIG move to the new home concludes sometime near the end of August / Start of September.

Thanks in advance to my Forum Fellows for any contributions that would help me

Sun-E

Sun-E wrote:
My wife and are moving and the tricky question of how to keep the infrastructure accessible which runs my business is needing addressing.

I have the same issue coming up over the next few months, so this is of interest to me...

My plan is to ship my hardware including my 2860ac Router and switch to it's temporary home at my friend's place and essentially, setup my router downstream of my friend's router, connecting the upstream router (my friend's) and my 'downstream' router via it's WAN port directly to an available ethernet port on the upstream router.

It strikes me, the simplest solution would be to put the PlusNet Router into Bridge mode, and connect it into the Vigor's WAN port (in place of the current Hitron, or (Super)Hub). The Vigor would need a minor WAN change (from DHCP to (probably) PPPoE, using his Plusnet credentials.

Then provide LAN access of some form (new VLAN?) to your friend's laptop, to keep him online :wink:. If he only uses Wifi, then, even easier, just add his original SSID to the Vigor. (No doubt he has at least one mobile phone that uses Wifi? Does he have other (I.O.T.) stuff, or printers that needs to be accomodated?)

I'm confident my friend's router can be configured (if need be) to accomodate my router downstream

You want to allow unfettered access to the 2860ac (so it can be the VPN end-point) and avoid double-NATing (which will undoubtedly break something).

In theory, you could dispense with the Plusnet router altogether, and re-configure the 2860AC to use its VDSL port - but Bridge mode is the definitely the easiest way to get it up and running.

That seems quite straight-forward, so maybe I've missed something

I suppose it depends on throughput but wouldn't it be a lot easier to buy a 3G/4G dongle and not have to worry about convoluted connections between devices?

Inbound VPN access becomes an issue though...